Abstract

Fūdo (Human milieux), published in 1935, is the most famous work by Watsuji Tetsurō (1889-1960), more so even than his major opus, Ethics (Rinrigaku). It was welcomed indeed principally as an essay on Japanese identity. Yet to define the Japanese identity was not for Watsuji the chief objective of that book. Fūdo was conceived in answer to Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (1927). To the emphasis put upon temporality in that masterwork, he answers by putting the emphasis on spatiality ; and to Heideggerian historicity (Geschichtlichkeit), he answers through the concept of fūdosei, defined by him as “the structural moment of human existence”, i.e. the dynamics of concrete spatiality in which each human being is involved through his or her existential relation with others as well as with things in his or her milieu. This central concept, created by Watsuji, is here rendered by means of the neologism “médiance” (from the Latin medietas, half), which expresses the duality of the human concretely reinstated in his or her milieu (fūdo) : an individual dimension (called, by Watsuji, hito) and a relational dimension (called aida by Watsuji), whilst the coupling (the médiance) of those two “halves” of being are embodied in the concrete human being (ningen). The translation is of the preamble and of the first chapter of Fūdo, where Watsuji presents and exposes his general theory of human milieux and of “médiance”, as well as of two extracts in which he offers an interpretation of the desert milieu (the Arabic and Moslem world) and of the bucolic milieu, namely Europe.